Monthly Archives: August 2014

“In the 1970s, women were expected to look good and sing, not innovate creatively”

Q: So Kate Bush is making a comeback after 35 years. Her last concert was in 1979. She’s making her return at Hammersmith Apollo. She’s doing 22 nights and every seat was sold in 15-minutes. This promises to be the biggest musical event of the year. Agree?

A: No doubt about it. At 56, Kate Bush has lost none of her mystique. Quite the opposite in fact: her 35 years as a relative recluse have deepened her enigma, made her more thrillingly mysterious than ever.

Q: Well, for people of your generation maybe. She surely can’t appeal to younger people, can she?

A: I’m not so sure. I think she’s a woman for all time. You’ve got to remember, when Kate emerged there were plenty of women singers, but, with the exception of the American Laurie Anderson, there was no female equivalent of, say, David Bowie, John Cale, Bob Dylan or Lennon and McCartney, who experimented with music, dance and other art forms. Kate was the first woman to innovate with music and dance and, in her unique way, mixed and meshed genres. So, I’d say she has a timeless quality.

A: In the 1970s, women were expected to look good and sing. Don’t get me wrong: the likes of Donna Summer, Diana Ross and Cher were tremendous. Over here, women such as Siouxsie Sue, Elkie Brooks and others were producing original material, but Kate Bush (pictured above in the 1970s) seemed to come out of nowhere. There were no obvious influences on her work. Apparently, she taught herself how to play a piano and started composing her own songs, then learned dance from Lindsay Kemp, who also taught Bowie. So when “Wuthering Heights” came out, no one knew what to make of it. Think about the very concept of writing a song based on a Brontë classic then performing it as she did. Now, we see women who seem bursting with creative energy and refuse to stick to traditional boundaries. Think of PJ Harvey, St Vincent, Joan as Police Woman (picture below), Bat for Lashes, for example. In the 1970s, there were no female artists ready to challenge like these; and even if they were, they would not stand much chance of commercial success. Kate was a real one-off in this sense. After her, the music industry started to take women as creative artists more seriously.

A: I’m not sure I can answer that. She has never explicitly said. Celebrity culture was probably a daunting prospect: she never liked engaging with the media much, so she may have foreseen what was coming in the 1980s when women like Madonna appeared and were prepared to get in bed with the media, so to speak. She was also upset when two of her close friends died with Aids. And if you take a look at her concerts on YouTube, you’ll get some idea of how her act was an entire performance rather than a series of songs. So maybe it required too much commitment. The irony is that, during her period away, interest has remained and, as I said earlier, grown in her absence. That’s why tickets for her concerts are reputed to be going at £5,000 a pop.

Q: You’re a fan then?

A: I think you can admire someone and acknowledge their impact without necessarily liking their output. I thought her early work was stunningly original and the 1985 album Hounds of Love was brilliant, but I wouldn’t say I was a devoted fan. But she was the first woman to break the mould and I think you have to accept that she was one of the most influential musical figures of the twentieth century and beyond. I think you could properly call her revolutionary.

Vicarious consumption is the key to understanding why we think she is worth it

Q: I see Kate Moss is worth £20 million. I knew she was pretty well-off, but usually a model’s earning power seems to decline as she gets older. Kate’s 40 now. I see you’ve commented on her staying power in the Observer (above). But I wanted to ask you a different question: how do we Brits look at seriously rich celebrities?

A: Interesting question. Of course, Kate is rich, but not super-rich. I mean, Bill Gates, the richest man in the world is worth about £30 billion and counting. Simon Cowell is now worth £300m. David Bowie’s return last year saw his wealth expand to £135m. Pete Cashmore (no relation), who started the social media blog Mashable from a room in his parents’ house near Aberdeen, is said to be worth £120m. But I take your point: we don’t resent these people having so much money.

Q: But I can remember when we begrudged the rich having so much money, while the rest of us scrambled to make a living. When I was a student the rich were a class apart; in a sense they were the enemy in the class war. What happened?

A: First of all, we’ve seen the rise of a new class of rich people who have made their fortune not from industry, or business, but from services, specifically sport, media and other parts of what we might describe as popular entertainment. Think of the three rich Brits I named above: we’re all consumers of their products. Even if we don’t watch The X Factor, or buy Bowie albums, or use Mashable, we are all part of a culture in which these are integral parts. We’re surrounded by their products and effects.

Q: This is something to do with consumption, isn’t it?

A: It is. We used to place a lot of importance on how much money people had. Now we’re interested in how they spend it. So we read about how much money Kim Kardashian (below) earns, and we know she has what most people regard as limited, if any, talent. But do we begrudge her the money? Not while we get so pleasure from reading about her £6 million ($10 million) wedding. We expect wealthy celebrities to entertain us.

A: That’s it, yes. Think of footballers and their cars. We’ve got past the point when we complain about the so-called obscene amounts of money they earn. We realize that they can earn that much because we’re prepared to pay so much to watch football and buy the products they advertise. So we expect them to provide us with amusement, not just on the football field, but in the way they waste their money. We find this gratifying.

Q: It’s a kind of vicarious consumption, right?

A: Good term: vicarious consumption. We experience in our imaginations how it must be to spend lavish amounts of money.

Q: But how about wealthy industrialists? They don’t entertain us.

A: Name one.

Q: Err …

A: Let me name a few: Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja, combined wealth, £11.9bn. Paul Sykes, the entrepreneur and property magnate who helped fund UKIP, has a fortune of £650m. We don’t get to hear about these people. If we did we would probably feel resentful and aggrieved that they have so much money, but don’t give us any value. I’m not saying they don’t create jobs, generate taxes and make a sizeable contribution to the UK economy. But they’re not in the media. That’s where we like the rich to be — right in our faces so we can see how they’re spending their money and, hopefully, getting into trouble doing it. Imagine if David and Victoria Beckham (worth £210m) stopped appearing in the media and drifted into obscurity. Not that this is likely to happen soon; but we’d think we were not getting much value out of them.

Q: So you’re saying consumption is so important now that we actually consume the rich.

A: That’s pretty much it: we know they’ve got rich thanks to our money and we want something back in return. As long as we are reminded about their expensive clothes, cars, houses, yachts, weddings and so on, we don’t mind. So I know people think Kate Moss has got rich just by appearing in fashionable places and looking good. But it wasn’t so long ago she was called “Cocaine Kate” and criticized for her dissipated lifestyle and her dodgy choices in men. She’s hardly ever been out of the limelight. And we’ve enjoy the Kate narrative so much, we’d probably miss her if she dropped off the radar.

Q: Let me summarize: while some time ago we were resentful of people who had a lot more money than the rest of us, we accept rich celebrities nowadays on the condition that they spend their money and maintain a lifestyle that we enjoy, albeit vicariously.

A: Yes. And remember: consumption isn’t just about buying stuff over the counter or online — though this is part of it. But it’s also about engaging with public figures, reading, watching, judging and talking about them in a manner we find agreeable. As long as they continue to amuse us, we’re prepared to accept their wealth. In other words, Kate Moss is probably worth her £20 million. @elliscashmore

Q: As a new football season kicks off, I thought I’d ask you about shirt sponsors. Hull City recently announced a deal worth “seven figures” with 12BETuk, which is a gambling outfit, and Everton has extended its contract with Chang beer for another three years; that’s worth £16 million to the club.

A: And don’t forget Everton’s neighbours, Liverpool, which gets £31 million per year for wearing shirts with Standard Charter emblazoned across the front.

Q: So my first question is: Why?

A: Simple answer is: advertising. The Premier League is broadcast practically everywhere on the planet, so every time a game is shown, viewers see 22 moving advertisements for their product. The cumulative viewing audience is colossal.

Q: When did all this start?

A: Well, you have to remember association football has always been sponsored. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clubs were usually started by churches or factories. The factories in particular sponsored teams with kit, travelling expenses and even wages after professionalism was allowed in 1864. But they weren’t allowed to use their players’ shirts to advertise themselves. That crept in during the late 1970s, at first in Germany. Eintracht Braunschweig carried the liqueur Jägermeister logo on their kit in 1973.

Q: That recently?

A: Kettering Town, when the club was in the Southern League, could actually claim to have been the first British club to wear shirts with a brand name, in this case Kettering Tyres, way back in the 1975-76 season. The late Derek Dougan (1938-2007, pictured above in early 1976) was the inspiration behind this innovation. The League told the club to remove the lettering. In 1977, Derby County explored a deal with Saab, the Swedish carmaker, and approached the Football League (this was before the Premier League) for permission. The deal didn’t go through, but, as the League approved it, Liverpool rushed in and clinched a deal with Hitachi.

Q: How much?

A: Difficult to know for sure, but £50,000 is the figure I’ve heard. It sounds a ridiculously small amount now, but back in 1978, no one had a clue whether it would be effective, so it was an experiment.

Q: It’s a wonder no one else came up with the idea before, isn’t it?

A: Not really. Football was a sport in the 1970s, not a popular entertainment. Let me explain: although it was a professional game and the players were well-paid after the maximum wage (i.e. wage ceiling) was abolished in 1961, football was not meant to be a business and fans were not customers; they were organic parts of the club. No one would have dared talk about a football market, as they do today. Clubs were wary of the accusation that they would be exploiting fans.

Q: I imagine the Football League was concerned too.

A: Absolutely. The lettering on the shirts was restricted to a maximum size, 2×8 inches back then, which is a lot smaller than the logos we see splattered across shirts today.

Q: But I guess it caught on straightaway, right?

A: Not quite: the television companies opposed it. BBC didn’t allow advertising of any kind and either refused to broadcast games featuring games with teams playing with sponsored shirts, or made those teams cover the lettering with tape. ITV opposed it for a different reason. As the company relied on advertising revenue, it hated the prospect of effectively advertising products and not only not receiving money for it, but having to pay for the privilege. So it was a highly controversial development. The television companies relented in 1983.

Q: Did fans wear the replica shirts with the sponsors’ names back then?

A: No. If you saw someone in the 1970s wearing a football shirt and trainers, you’d assume they had been playing football. The shirts started to be worn as casual clothes around the mid-1980s. Now, this was a crucial development because when fans started wearing replica shirts, it meant that a commercial sponsor had it’s name or logo worn not just by eleven men, but by thousands and, in the case of well-supported clubs millions of people. I know it’s not a reliable figure, but Manchester United claim over 600 million fans around the world, which is why Chevrolet is paying the club £357million to plaster its logo on shirts for the next seven years (see picture below).

A: Precisely. If one person had dreamt this up, he or she would have been called a marketing genius. But it came about almost by accident. Remember the figure Liverpool gets paid by Standard & Charter bank: £31 million per year. This reflects Liverpool’s huge fan base, a global fan base too. So all over the world, fans are walking around advertising the bank.

Q: That sounds like exploitation.

A: It is. But no one is forcing the fans to pay fifty quid for the 2014-15 shirts, and, if you tried to sell the shirt without the sponsor’s name, fans would complain that it wasn’t an accurate replica. So they willingly agree to be like sandwich board carriers.

Q: So let me try to sum this up. You’re saying that shirt deals have to be understood in the context of changes in the sport rather than just changes in the regulations?

A: Yes. When shirts sponsorship was introduced, many people thought it was against the spirit of football and hurt its integrity. It also used the fans, rather than respected them. The idea of exploiting fans appalled most people. But, as football has become an entertainment industry, the fans have become customers and, as such, they are there to be squeezed. Look at the hikes in season ticket prices as another example. Fans enjoy wearing team strips and they want their shirts to look exactly the same as the players’. They say the most effective form of advertising is when people don’t realize it’s advertising. This is a perfect example.